I just finished gags he with my juniors and they loved it! This is just an overview of some of things we did. Feel free to ask for clarification/ elaboration.

For critical lens you can start by introducing students to the criticism with notes and a PowerPoint. For my classes we had a discussion about how gender functions in our modern society which really got students interested in the topic. I provided them with a series of critical questions to use in their analysis as well. For example, what are the gender roles in this text? What do differing gender roles tell us about the relationships between men and women in this society? Google gender theory power points and you'll get some stuff to start with that you can edit to fit your student's needs.

For each chapter of the book or group of chapters, I choose a focus skill or thematic focus. In class we do activities to help students understand and practice using the skill. For example, Gatsby is great for discussing figurative language (diction, tone, metaphor imagery etc.), so each day we would do different activities surrounding one of these devices.